Program Manager
Categories: Careers
You've got a program manager, and then you've got a project manager. The project manager is the person you deal with every day, the one you report to with your part of the project. The program manager shows up every once in a while, gives a speech, or asks how you're doing, even though they clearly have no idea who you are or what you do.
Or, to put it another way, a program manager oversees a set of related projects. It's a position that sits on top of a series of project managers, each of whom have their own particular venture to manage.
You work at a movie studio that just bought a new set of superhero characters: the Underwear Gang. It includes a stable of 25 characters. The company immediately puts three movies in the works, based on three different characters, with a fourth team-up movie set to come out five years from now.
Each of those individual movies will have a producer. Those are the project managers in this scenario. Meanwhile, you're put in charge of the entire Underwear Gang brand. You are the program manager. You make sure that all the projects are on schedule, and ensure that all the details in the movies fit together seamlessly for the big team-up that's surely coming at some point.
The term "program manager" comes up most in the IT or credit card industries.
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Finance a la shmoop... what are CEOs, CFOs and COOs lots of C's you know sort of
like most of our high school report cards but it's a different story [Girl given a school report card with list of C grades]
all right so the C here for all of these stands for chief not the C in
big cheese and the O here for all of these stands for officer...
But sort of in that vein cop ish like when you are one of these
officers it's your watch your beat your patrol and all that the delimiter here
is the middle letter so let's start at the top there E the E in CEO stands for
executive and distinctively the CEO is hired by the board of directors who in
turn is elected by the common shareholders the CEO is in charge of and [Woman CEO standing in her office]
well pretty much everything basically executing on the mandate which is to
make money over the long term for shareholders the CEO deals with both
internal operational and financial issues as well as dealing directly with
shareholders externally you know on the outside people ie those Wall Street folk [People working in Wall Street]
and she is generally you know where the buck stop...okay
moving on and that'll make some nice venison....Okay the CFO is
hired by the CEO and while on bad days the F might stand for something else
on a normal day the F stands for financial, the chief financial officer
deals with the dollar numbers the bean-counting [CFO counting beans]
from hiring and paying people usually via the head of human resources hired by
the CFO to tracking profitability of divisions which the CFO usually does in
concert with others in the company to you know dealing with Wall Street people [CFO holding a chicken wing]
as the wing man to the CEO at rubber chicken lunches
well if the company is
gonna raise debt to go buy a competitor or sell equity from insiders in a
secondary offering or use stock to acquire a tools company which will let
it operate more efficiently well all of that goes through the CFOs highly [A cluttered desk of beans]
cluttered desk all right so moving on then there's the COO and if you say
it all together it sounds like a bird but it's not the middle O there stands
for operating well other than in a company which just does surgery all day [a heart monitor in a surgery room]
the operating officer doesn't actually do surgery rather she operates the
company and usually that involves asking a thousand questions hopefully not all
at once like that Fed Ex guy who had too much caffeine are we getting the best
prices on the raw plastic we're ordering from war-torn New Zealand, are we making
enough selfie helmets, and is your dad still disappointed with you for getting
a C in accounting 101 back in high school
mm-hmm? just keeping it real there pal... well we can't answer the first two
and as for the last one well you're a COO oh you can probably afford a nice
shrink now so go work out your issues [COO laying on sofa talking with psychiatrist]